


Be My HUD?

by ZombyEmblem



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reduced-Sodium Despair, Dangan Ronpa Spoilers, F/F, Fluff, Food, Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:40:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3809029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZombyEmblem/pseuds/ZombyEmblem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>==REPOSTED FOLLOWING ebooks-tree SCARE==</p><p>It’s not every day you get to share time on the battlefield with someone who’s beautiful in every way there is. Not until Mukuro Ikusaba gets a new partner to work with.</p><p>(Day 3 of SHSL Rarepair Week! Prompt: The Lovers Arcana.)<br/>(The Lovers symbolize personal bonds, unions of love, and recognition of one’s personal beliefs.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be My HUD?

Two Monokuma bots traipsed out into a dirt field amidst the ruins of Shibuya. It was a field just large enough to house a baseball diamond, and there were plenty of other Monokumas around for the occasion. One of the pair was painted all white and covered in bandages, and the other was decked out in black coating and gaudy golden trinkets.

The black one turned to its friend. “Upupupu! You know, Shirokuma,” it began, popping the cigar out of its gilded teeth, “strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names.”

Shirokuma tilted its head. “Funny names?”

The black one shook its own head. “Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the Fukuoka team—” it gestured out to the Monokumas on the field already, lazing about or nibbling spare remains of victims of the Tragedy—“Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third—”

“That's what I want to find out, Kurokuma,” Shirokuma interrupted. “I wanted you to tell me the names of the bears on the Fukuoka team.”

“I'm telling you. Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third—”

“You know their names?”

"Yeah.” A rogue baseball smashed Kurokuma square in the face. The middle of five extending blade claws on its hand shot up toward the perpetrator—some wiseguy in the outfield—in automatic response.

Shirokuma tripped over the same baseball. “Well, then, who's playing first?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean the bear's name on first base.”

Kurokuma put the cigar back in its mouth and grinned pretty much like it always did. “Who.”

Shirokuma was a little confused now. “The bear playing first base.”

“Who.” Kurokuma grinned a little more than it always did and bit its cigar apart, letting the outside half drop onto the ground.

Shirokuma tripped over that, too. “The guy on first base.”

“Who is on first,” said Kurokuma in the tone of one who’s withholding something.

Shirokuma finally stopped walking and threw up its hands. “Wait, what are you asking me for?”

Kurokuma spun around in celebration of its joke. “Oi, I'm not askin’ you--I'm tellin’ you. Who is on first!”

Shirokuma sighed and stepped closer. “I'm asking you--who's on first?” “That's the bear’s name.”

“That's who's name?”

“Yeah!”

Both let out a harmonized “Upupupu!” and put their hands over their mouths, giggling like dumbasses.

Then there was the loud impact of a sniper round entering Shirokuma’s robotic head, followed by a warbled “And the shhhhORTstop is iiiIIII DON’t give a DANGLEGRDK—” and a loud _thud_ as it collapsed. Kurokuma soon followed suit, as did the rest of the Monokumas present.

From the window of the office complex next door, Mukuro Ikusaba breathed a sigh of relief. She heard no kind of enemy chatter in her earpiece now. The headset let her tap into the communications of these robots, but she wished she hadn’t needed to listen to that. She lowered her rifle and pressed the headset’s mic closer to her mouth. “All known hostiles down. Waiting for scan report.”

“Mhm. Scanning,” came the soft, angelic voice in her ear. Mukuro waited, watching the stairways into the room she occupied. She was partially shielded by an overturned file cabinet, but caution hurt no one.

At last a follow-up arrived. “Scan complete. No more hostiles detected in the vicinity.” A pause, and then, “I think.”

Mukuro got to her feet and her hand returned to the mic. “Good,” she breathed. “I’m sorry you had to listen to that whole thing,” she added as an afterthought.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be okay,” her partner replied. “Now we can begin the healing process.”

* * *

 

Mukuro’s partnership with Chiaki Nanami was a relatively new circumstance.

Following Makoto Naegi’s acquisition of the Escape Switch, the fifteen near-victims of the School Life of Mutual Killing fled to the outside world to find it completely devoid of any security. The specter of home they chased out the sealed metal door of the academy vanished into a smog of decay as they found that a great Tragedy had befallen the world.

Miraculously, none of them were killed in their new surroundings. Maybe it was because they had a large handful of gifted leaders, or because they also had two students who were specialized for combat (and another whose job description included “punching shit across the room,” as he would have put it). Whatever the case, though, they made it out. And after a few weeks of struggling to stick together, they were located by the Future Foundation.

The Foundation wasted little time putting each of the survivors to work in their areas of expertise. For Mukuro, that meant destroying Monokumas outdoors. She welcomed the chance to work on her own again—she wasn’t terribly comfortable in social situations, especially with the people whom she had had the audacity to call her “classmates.” Every minute she spent in the presence of one of them, who knew well that at a definite point in time she had been planning to help murder them—that was too much trouble. Solitude was preferable.

Even so, it was a little frustrating to just saunter out into enemy territory completely unaided. The Future Foundation had little to offer in terms of air support, surveillance, or even patrol partners. Her work was thus reduced to wandering about, shooting any Monokumas she saw, which was hardly efficient. Missing one or two meant an area would remain unsafe for civilians and fellow operatives. Luckily, one of her coworkers was attentive to these problems.

So one day, having been called down to the little one-desk tech office set up near the side of the headquarters, Mukuro Ikusaba stood rigidly next to an open swivel chair, listening attentively to her ally explaining the new plan.

“I’ve told some of the others about this, but I was thinking of how some of you who are fighting to defend us out there don’t have any assistance,” chirped Chihiro Fujisaki, whose attention was divided between her explanation and the file pathways she was rolling through on the just slightly outdated computer on the desk. “So, I tried to see if I could repurpose some of my artificial intelligence projects to help you out on your missions.” She paused to look for approval, or some sign of understanding. Mukuro nodded. “They’ll communicate with you through a headset with a microphone, and using the tech in a bracelet kind of accessory I’m working on, they’ll be able to locate Monokumas and civilians nearby. And they can hack the Monokumas and listen to what they're saying, if you need to do some recon.”

Mukuro nodded again, a little less comfortable. The support was desperately needed, she thought, but did they really have to be able to talk? “What’s the AI going to be like?”

“Oh!” Fujisaki went back to her computer and rapidly hopping through menus and windows. “Um, I said I had ‘projects’ that I could repurpose, but the truth is, I don’t have much.” She trailed off and moved her head a little closer to the monitor, trying to avoid eye contact. “So, for you, I was thinking of using a form of the AI who’s been assisting in the therapy program for the Ultimate Despair students. Here she is.”

Fujisaki performed a few final keystrokes, and a girl appeared on the screen. She was short and somewhat baggy, kind of hanging down gently as if trying not to float off the ground and mostly succeeding; her round face seemed trustworthy at a glance, with pale brown hair—wait, is it pink?—that curved and winged out slightly as it flowed down her head, just halfway down her forehead in the front and below the ears in the back. Her outfit was typical of what a girl might have been wearing before the Tragedy struck. And… she was fast asleep. On her feet.

Fujisaki looked to her guest with the soft, budding grin of a proud little bunny. “Her name’s Chiaki Nanami. Go on, say hi!”

Mukuro stepped over to the computer screen, trepidacious over the prospect of yet another awkward partnership to get involved with. The girl on the screen opened her eyes, looked forward, made eye contact, and smiled like a toasty pillow.

* * *

 

“So eventually—and I don’t know how or why—he gives her the camera back, but…” Her voice wavers with a little giggle. “It was perfectly normal before, but now it’s shaped like a vehicle!”

Mukuro snorts, earning a succession of louder giggles for her embarrassment. It’s not a favorite habit of hers, but nobody’s around to hear it except the girl in her ear. It takes a few seconds before Mukuro’s silent laughter dies down enough for her to be able to swallow the bite of rations she almost choked on. What a way to go that would have been. “Did you get to catch the aftermath of that?”

A brief hum precedes the response. “No, I think I feel asleep before anything happened. And they were both gone when I woke up. But I like to think that whatever happened gave new meaning to the phrase ‘Fatal Frame.’”

Mukuro doesn’t know the original meaning of that one, but it hardly matters. She nudges a little snicker out of herself just to make her partner happy. Anything that pleases her is worth a bit of effort. It also alleviates her own mood; she catches herself kicking her legs as they dangle over the edge of the building’s roof. Professional.

There is a nagging twinge in her ribs, though. Something’s poking at her a little bit, and the itch of having to suppress it is getting increasingly grating. The same old trepidation materializes like a rock in her throat as she pulls the mic back to her mouth. “Nanami-san, do—”

“Chiaki.” It’s a reminder that has to be repeated more than it should, but Mukuro can’t help but default to formal language, even with someone she knows so well. Nanami—Chiaki is never anything but gracious about it, luckily. No pressure to apologize. (Mukuro does anyway.)

“Chiaki-san, um…” Mukuro fights a bit to keep her throat open as she anticipates what’s going to come of her next question. “Do you… trust me?”

“Of course!”

The reply is so immediate, so emphatic, that Mukuro is surprised to the point of forgetting her fears. Suddenly her throat feels fine. “Really?”

There’s a deafening silence—it only lasts a moment, but it feels eternal. Then Chiaki’s lacy voice returns. “You know,” she intones, her pitch climbing over her chin, “I worry sometimes that my friends on the island are going to be upset with me when their treatment is finished. I’ve been lying to them, haven’t I? It’s not a hurtful lie, but being deceived isn’t easy to accept as a gesture of goodwill.” Another dainty pause, and then, “… I think.”

Mukuro puts down her food. “I see.” Frustratingly, she can’t find anything better to say. She doesn’t understand why the conversation turned onto this path.

“But… I do what I can to help them out, so I think it’ll be okay. Like your friends.”

The soldier is thankful she wasn’t trying to eat, because she’s sure she would have choked again. “I-I’m sorry, could you..?”

The voice in the earpiece rushes a bit, the most panicked voice Chiaki ever uses. “Ah, I’m sorry! I mean that I think your friends recognize how you helped them survive in the long run. And that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Silence. Pressure building rings around her eyes, she pulls the microphone away from her mouth. This shouldn’t be having an effect on her. She’s a soldier. She should be in control of herself. The little, globular tears sliding away ignore those thoughts. At least she doesn’t get anything on the microphone, she thinks, although the shaking of her fingers might have already registered as scratchy noise in the mouthpiece.

“Mukuro-san?” The voice returns, fluffy and enveloping.

Mukuro sniffles loudly, as much an answer as anything else.

“When you asked me if I trust you… I got distracted, didn’t I? Sorry.” Chiaki’s words take on a new dimension now. There’s a new warmth in them, like fresh laundry. More than that—they feel like a wool blanket, the kind a child gets to comfort them in the colder nights. The kind Mukuro remembers from girlhood, when her parents had arms to hold their children, when the roar of ballistics wasn’t the sole guide in the dark uncertainty of this world.

“Actually, Mukuro-san,” Chiaki continues, soft and basked in sunlight, “I trust you a lot. Maybe… maybe more than the others.” Something in her angelic lilt has melted; it’s smooth and soft, but still unmistakably fluidic. “I really like you, Mukuro-san.”

Mukuro sits up slowly. The sun is setting, but it’s at her back. Something seems to have draped itself over her shoulders, velveteen and restorative. For a moment, she gazes down at the bed she shares with her sister, up at the sun filtering through the window. The blanket snuggles the two of them together this morning, like any other, a tie of safety. Then she looks back up, surveying the skyline of a desolate, ruined city. Somehow, it doesn’t feel so different.

She returns to her microphone. “I feel the same, Chiaki-san.”

Giggles again. Those _precious_ giggles.

“Isn’t it sort of weird, saying that to someone like me? Someone who’s not human? I mean,” (and Mukuro can practically hear her put a finger to her lip and look upwards in contemplation), “you’ve already survived the Dark Hour at least a few times, and I’m sure you’ve beaten a Full Moon boss by now, but neither of us has awakened our Persona yet.”

The soldier shifts her weight and smiles into her lap. “Maybe that’s what we’re doing right now.”

There’s a huff. “That’s good for you, but I don’t have special powers yet. I shouldn’t even get them until—Oh.” Chiaki audibly smiles as something returns to her mind. “Fujisaki-sama doesn’t want me to tell anyone about this yet, but it’s possible in the future that I might get a robot body. And I’m trying to convince them to give me robot gun arms, but they’re not listening to me.” Now her cheeks are puffed out in overblown frustration. It’s beautiful, being able to read an expression from just her voice. ‘I’ll win them over, though. I think. I could be a machine-gun robot!”

Mukuro brings the mic back to her lips. “Chiaki-san?”

“Hmm?”

“Will you…” This is so ridiculous, but she goes for it anyway. “Will you be my machine-gun robot girlfriend?”

Another silent smile. “Of course,” she answers, softness in her heart, fabric in her voice. “… I think.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy, this baby's gettin' long in the tooth! Alright, where were we... uh. If you ever liked Who's On First, I apologize. I'm so sorry. But not really. I'm actually not sorry at all.  
> Alrighty, let's just run through Nanami's game references:  
> -Fatal Frame is a horror series involving using a camera to see ghosts. I... don't honestly know that much about it, but it's a good pun. Both for the camera part, and Souda getting his asS WRECKED  
> -Dark Hour, Full Moon boss, and Persona are all references to Persona 3. The Dark Hour is a period after midnight where some people have to deal with monster assaults and normal folk are just asleep. Full Moon bosses are... bosses that appear on the night of a full moon. Personas are the magical monster-thingies that you get after... just look that up, I honestly don't remember how to best explain them.  
> -Nanami's transition from her own powers to robots is an oblique reference to Aigis, a character from the game. She's a girl-shaped robot made to destroy shadowy monsters, and she comes with her Persona already awakened.  
> -"Machine-gun robot girlfriend" is a double reference. The phrase comes from one of the tutorial movies from Kid Icarus: Uprising, but it's also most certainly a reference to the character Curly Brace from Cave Story.


End file.
